Free Website Accessibility Audit

Start with the word itself. What is a11y? It's the industry's shorthand for accessibility — an 'a', then eleven letters, then a 'y' — so the a11y meaning is simply accessibility written as a numeronym, the same trick that turns internationalization into i18n. When people ask what is a11y in practice, they mean the same thing as what is digital accessibility: designing websites, apps, and documents so that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, and operate them.

The digital accessibility definition covers a wide range of needs — someone using a screen reader because they're blind, keyboard-only navigation because they can't use a mouse, captions because they're deaf, generous contrast and text sizing for low vision, and clear, simple layouts for cognitive differences. So what is website accessibility, concretely, is building for all of those at once rather than for a single 'average' visitor. And what is accessibility at bottom? Removing the barriers that would otherwise lock a real person out of what your page does.

It's worth being clear on the accessibility benefits, because this isn't only about compliance. The same work that helps disabled users — real text instead of images of text, semantic headings, keyboard support, captions — also helps everyone: it improves SEO, mobile usability, and page speed, and it's the foundation of accessibility in computing and computer accessibility generally. An accessible site is usually just a better-built site.

Almost every rule this tool checks traces back to one document, so it's worth answering what is WCAG directly. To define WCAG: it stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the internationally recognised standard published by the W3C that spells out how to make web content accessible. It's organised under four principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR) — and each guideline has testable success criteria graded at three conformance levels: A (essential), AA (the real-world target), and AAA (the strictest, rarely required across a whole site).

There are a few versions in circulation. WCAG 2.0 arrived in 2008, 2.1 added mobile and low-vision criteria in 2018, and 2.2 finished the set in 2023. The practical wcag 2.1 vs 2.2 difference is small — 2.2 adds nine criteria (focus appearance, dragging alternatives, accessible authentication) and removes one — so if you conform to 2.2 AA you cover 2.1 as well. For day-to-day work the W3C's own wcag 2.2 quick reference is the canonical checklist of every criterion.

In the United States, WCAG is also the yardstick behind the law: Section 508 requires federal agencies and their vendors to meet WCAG 2.0 AA, which is why section 508 compliance testing and WCAG testing are effectively the same exercise. So what is accessibility testing? At its core it's checking a page against these WCAG success criteria — exactly what the audit above does automatically for the machine-detectable subset.

Run enough audits and you'll see the same violation top the list again and again: text that doesn't stand out enough from its background. Poor contrast is the most common automated failure on the web, and the wcag color contrast rule is precise about it — normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, and large text at least 3:1. Low contrast colors — pale grey text on white, a brand tint pressed into body copy — are the usual culprits, and bad contrast websites fail this across their entire template at once, so a single fix can lift a whole site.

Contrast isn't only about text. The newer non-text contrast criterion (WCAG 1.4.11) requires meaningful non-text things — icons, input borders, focus indicators — to also clear 3:1, which is why the wcag 2.2 non-text contrast 1.4.11 rule catches invisible form fields and ghostly buttons that technically work but nobody can see.

Contrast matters most for the roughly one in twelve men (and one in two hundred women) with colour vision deficiency, so good color blind design never leans on colour alone to carry meaning — a red/green 'error/success' pair with no icon or label is unreadable to them. The colors to avoid for color blindness are the classic confusable pairs: red with green, green with brown, blue with purple. Rather than bolting on a separate colorblind mode, the durable fix is to design with enough contrast and redundant cues from the start — those are the color blind colors to avoid pairing, and high contrast text is the baseline that helps everyone, colour-blind or not.

Most accessibility issues fall into a handful of categories, and knowing them turns a raw audit into a to-do list. If you're working out how to make a website accessible, this is the short version of every web accessibility checklist — the failures a tool like this catches, in rough order of how often they show up:

The reason accessibility gets budget is usually legal, so it's worth stating plainly. Do websites have to be ada compliant? In the U.S., courts have consistently read the Americans with Disabilities Act to cover websites as 'places of public accommodation', so for most businesses the practical answer to does my website need to be ada compliant is yes. Title II of ADA covers state and local government — and a 2024 DOJ rule now explicitly requires their sites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, which makes title ii compliance concrete — while Title III covers private business.

There's no government certificate to earn, so what is an ada compliant website really means one that conforms to WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA, the standard everyone points to. And the pressure is real: web accessibility lawsuits and demand letters run into the thousands each year, and a single website ada compliance lawsuit can cost far more than the fix would have. So how to make your website ada compliant is, concretely, to work through the WCAG failures this tool surfaces and keep them fixed.

That last part is the catch. Ada compliant websites don't stay that way on their own: every deploy can drop an alt attribute, ship a new component without a label, or quietly lower a contrast ratio, and nothing visibly breaks when it happens. A one-time audit is a snapshot; accessibility monitoring is the camera left running. Uptura re-runs this exact axe-core audit against your pages on a schedule and alerts you — to email or Slack, with the rule and the element — the moment a deploy introduces a new WCAG violation. Free during our public beta, so the regression that would have become a demand letter is something you fix the day it ships. And before you're tempted by a shortcut: an accessibility overlay, the widget that promises 'compliance in one line of JavaScript', doesn't fix any of this — overlays patch the page at runtime, screen-reader users widely report they make things worse, and they haven't stopped the lawsuits. There's no substitute for fixing the underlying HTML.